Donation Brought Access to DeLay

Following up on a story that's been over two years in the making. From the Dallas Morning News via Common Dreams courtesy of Mother Jones:

A company indicted in a Texas campaign fundraising case says it was told that by giving a Tom DeLay political committee $25,000, company officials would get access to the U.S. House majority leader to influence legislation.

In court documents, Westar Energy of Kansas says that to meet with Mr. DeLay in 2002, company officials "were told they needed to write a check for $25,000" to Texans for a Republican Majority, known as TRMPAC.

It's the first time a company has said it donated to the Texas committee created by Mr. DeLay in exchange for a meeting and legislative help.

Click here for the rest.

From Merriam-Webster Online:

quid pro quo: something given or received for something else

In political terms, "quid pro quo" means buying legislation, which is utterly illegal, immoral, undemocratic, and anti-American. And that's exactly what Westar did with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Even though the Westar energy legislation sponsored by DeLay was withdrawn after an Austin grand jury started poking its nose around the abuses in Texas of DeLay's fierce money making machine, the fact that the Lizard King tried at all is enough to send him back to his Sugar Land bug killing business for good. If you didn't already realize, the most powerful Republican in Congress is nothing but a crook.

Unfortunately, as noted by Mother Jones, DeLay isn't the only Congressman who conducts the people's business in such a sleazy way. Really, most of them, both Democrats and Republicans, suckle at the corporate teat on a continual basis, rendering our democracy meaningless. If DeLay goes down, he'll simply be a sacrificial scapegoat, allowing the cash leprosy infecting our government to stay on its usual fetid course. The potential here reminds me of the delusional liberal victory celebrations after Nixon resigned: Tricky Dick was gone, yes, but the system that made his crimes likely was largely left in place; thirty years later, President Bush is breaking at will laws that Nixon never even thought of breaking.

Taking down a few crooked politicians here and there won't change anything. What's needed is a total overhaul of campaign finance laws: there must be absolutely no donations at all; all campaigns must be publicly financed, and all politicians must be kept miles away from any and all fundraising groups. Anything short of this will simply be corrupt business as usual.

DeLay may very well go down, even to prison, which I will no doubt savor like a fine wine if it happens. His exit, however, in no way means that democracy will have prevailed. The danger is that Americans won't seize the opportunity to truly repair our republic, and that's got me worried.

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